Gustave Caillebotte

Gustave Caillebotte was born on 19 August 1848 to an upper-class Parisian family living in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. His father, Martial Caillebotte (1799–1874), was the inheritor of the family’s military textile business and was also a judge at the Seine department’s Tribunal de commerce.

Caillebotte earned a law degree in 1868 and a license to practice law in 1870, and trained to be an engineer but became interested in painting and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He met Pierre Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet in 1874 and showed his works at the Impressionist exhibition of 1876 and its successors. Caillebotte became the chief organizer, promoter, and financial backer of the Impressionist exhibitions for the next six years, and he used his wealth to purchase works by other Impressionists, notably Edouard Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir., Camille Pissarro, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Alfred Sisley, and Berthe Morisot. Shortly after his education, he was drafted to fight in the Franco-Prussian war, and served from July 1870 to March 1871 in the Garde Nationale Mobile de la Seine.

After the war, Caillebotte began visiting the studio of painter Léon Bonnat, where he began to study painting seriously. He developed an accomplished style in a relatively short time and had his first studio in his parents’ home. In 1873, Caillebotte entered the École des Beaux-Arts, but apparently did not spend much time there. He inherited his father’s fortune in 1874 and the surviving sons divided the family fortune after their mother’s death in 1878. Gustave and his brother sold the Yerres estate and moved into an apartment in the Boulevard Haussmann in Paris.

Around 1874, Caillebotte had met and befriended several artists working outside the Académie des Beaux-Arts, including Edgar Degas and Giuseppe de Nittis, and attended (but did not participate in) the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. The “Impressionists” – also called the “Independents”, “Intransigents”, and “Intentionalists” – had broken away from the academic painters showing in the annual Salons.

Caillebotte made his debut in the second Impressionist exhibition in 1876, showing eight paintings, including Les raboteurs de parquet (The Floor Scrapers) (1875), his earliest masterpiece. Its subject matter, the depiction of labourers preparing a wooden floor (thought to have been that of the artist’s own studio) was considered “vulgar” by some critics and this is the probable reason for its rejection by the Salon of 1875.

In common with his precursors Jean-François Millet and Gustave Courbet, as well his contemporary Edgar Degas, Caillebotte aimed to paint reality as it existed and as he saw it, hoping to reduce the inherent theatricality of painting. Perhaps because of his close relationship with so many of his peers, his style and technique vary considerably among his works, as if “borrowing” and experimenting, but not really sticking to any one style. At times, he seems very much in the Degas camp of rich-colored realism (especially his interior scenes); at other times, he shares the Impressionist commitment to “optical truth” and employs an impressionistic pastel-softness and loose brush strokes most similar to Renoir and Camille Pissarro, although with a less vibrant palette.

The tilted ground common to these paintings is characteristic of Caillebotte’s work, which may have been strongly influenced by Japanese prints and the new technology of photography, although evidence of his use of photography is lacking. Cropping and “zooming-in”, techniques that commonly are found in Caillebotte’s oeuvre, may also be the result of his interest in photography, but may just as likely be derived from his intense interest in perspective effects. A large number of Caillebotte’s works also employ a very high vantage point, including View of Rooftops (Snow) (Vue de toits (Effet de neige)) (1878), Boulevard Seen from Above (Boulevard vu d’en haut) (1880), and A Traffic Island (Un refuge, boulevard Haussmann) (1880).

Caillebotte painted many domestic and familial scenes, interiors, and portraits. Many of his paintings depict members of his family; Young Man at His Window (Jeune Homme à la fenêtre) (1876) shows René in the home on rue de Miromesnil; The Orange Trees (Les Orangers) (1878), depicts Martial Jr. and his cousin Zoé in the garden of the family property at Yerres; and Portraits in the Country (Portraits à la campagne) (1875) includes Caillebotte’s mother along with his aunt, cousin, and a family friend.

Caillebotte is best known for his paintings of urban Paris, such as The Europe Bridge (Le Pont de l’Europe) (1876), and Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877). The latter is almost unique among his works for its particularly flat colors and photo-realistic effect, which give the painting its distinctive and modern look, almost akin to American Realists such as Edward Hopper. Many of his urban paintings were quite controversial due to their exaggerated, plunging perspective. In Man on a Balcony (1880), he invites the viewer to share the balcony with his subject and join in observing the scene of the city reaching into the distance, again by using unusual perspective. Showing little allegiance to any one style, many of Caillebotte’s other urban paintings produced in the same period, such as The Place Saint-Augustin (1877), are considerably more impressionistic.

In Oarsman in a Top Hat (1877), he effectively manages the perspective of a passenger in the back of a rowboat facing his rowing companion and the stream ahead, in a manner much more realistic and involving than Manet’s Boating (1874).

Caillebotte’s masterpiece, Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877), uses bold perspective to create a monumental portrait of a Paris intersection on a rainy day. Caillebotte also painted portraits and figure studies, boating scenes and rural landscapes, and decorative studies of flowers. He tended to use brighter colours and heavier brushwork in his later works.

In 1881, Caillebotte acquired a property at Petit-Gennevilliers, on the banks of the Seine near Argenteuil, and he moved there permanently in 1888. He ceased showing his work at age 34 and devoted himself to gardening and to building and racing yachts, and he spent much time with his brother, Martial, and his friend Pierre Auguste Renoir. Renoir often came to stay at Petit-Gennevilliers, and engaged in far-ranging discussions on art, politics, literature, and philosophy. Caillebotte was a model for Renoir’s 1881 painting, Luncheon of the Boating Party.

Caillebotte died of pulmonary congestion while working in his garden at Petit-Gennevilliers in 1894 at age 45. He was interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Caillebotte was an artist of remarkable abilities, but his posthumous reputation languished because most of his paintings remained in the hands of his family and were neither exhibited nor reproduced until the second half of the 20th century. His early paintings feature the broad new boulevards and modern apartment blocks created by Baron Haussmann for Paris in the 1850s and ’60s. Seventy years after his death, however, art historians began reevaluating his artistic contributions. His striking use of varying perspective is particularly admirable and sets him apart from his peers who may have otherwise surpassed him. His art was largely forgotten until the 1950s when his descendants began to sell the family collection. In 1964, The Art Institute of Chicago acquired Paris Street; Rainy Day, spurring American interest in him. By the 1970s, his works were being exhibited again and critically reassessed.

Caillebotte’s Man on a Balcony, Boulevard Haussmann (Homme au balcon, boulevard Haussmann) (1880), sold for more than US$14.3 million in 2000.